Thursday August 17, 2006

I just finished my latest 24 hour stint as a monitored system. I was wearing the Philips Medical DigiTrak-Plus 24 portable cardiac monitoring system. These devices are often called Holter monitors. This one is a slick little system, much smaller and lighter than the old cassette walkman sized units I used to wear. With fewer leads, too.

The unit records 175 10-bit samples per second over 24 hours onto an internal 64 MB CF card. The external interface is via USB using a proprietary Philips dock. Too bad--it would be fun to download the data and look at it myself. With a $1300 replacement cost, I'm not going to muck with it.

This passive and temporary monitor is no big deal--just an inconvenience. Contrast this to my sister, whose similarly sized-unit is embedded in her shoulder under her clavicle. It does monitoring, but also has an "auto-reboot" feature that uses platinum wires threaded into her heart, should the need arise. Now that is a serious monitoring system.